They, in all probability, will figure out that the story has already completely formed itself, in all its essentials and in many details, in your subconscious mind, the lowermost cellar of your uninteresting personality where moth and rust do not corrupt, whatever harm they may do higher up, and where the cobwebs lie even more thickly than in your alleged brain. As you write, and as the result of the mere act of writing, the story, lying dormant in your subcellar, slowly shakes a leg, quivers, stretches, extends itself to its full length, yawns, rises with sundry anatomical contortions and advancing crosses the threshold of your subconsciousness into the well-dusted and cleaned basement of your consciousness whence it is but a step to full daylight and the shadow of printed black characters upon a to-and-fro travelling page. In other words, you are an automaton; and to be an automaton in this world of exuberant originality is a blissful thing. Your brain is not engaged at all. This is why writing fiction actually rests the brain. It is why those who are suffering from brain-fag find recreation and enjoyment, health and mental strength in writing a short story or a novel. The short story is a two weeks’ vacation for the tired mind. Writing a novel is a month, with full pay. It is true that readers are rather prone to resent the widespread habit of novelists recuperating and recovering their mental faculties at their readers’ expense. This resentment is without any justification in fact, since for every novelist who recovers from brain-fag by writing a work of fiction there are thousands of readers who restore their exhausted intellects with a complete rest by reading the aforesaid work of fiction. Of course the subconscious cellar theory of novel-writing is not final and authoritative. There is at least one other tenable explanation of how novels are written, and we proceed to give it. This is that the story is projected through the personality of the writer who is, in all respects, no more than a mechanism and whose rôle may be accurately compared to that of a telephone transmitter in a talk over the wire.